Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Registering with Search Engines

For most people, search engines are the one and only tool for finding information on the Web. If you want the average person to find your site, you need to make sure it’s in the most popular search engine catalogs and turns up as one of the results in relevant searches. This task is harder than it seems, because the Web is full of millions of sites jockeying for position. To get noticed, you need to spend time developing your site and enhancing its visibility. You also need to understand how search engines rank pages (see the box on How Google’s PageRank Works for more information).

The undisputed king of web search engines is Google (www.google.com). It’s far and away the Web’s most popular search tool, with a commanding share of over 70 percent of all search traffic.

Second place currently goes to Yahoo, and third place to Microsoft’s Bing. But behind the scenes, Yahoo quietly uses Bing to power its search results. This means that just two search engines (Google and Bing) are responsible for at least 95 percent of the web searches in the Western world. Other countries, particularly those with web censorship practices, like China, have their own search engines.

It’s not too difficult to get Google and other search engines to notice your site. By the time your site’s about a month old, Google will probably have stumbled across it at least once, usually by following a link from another site or from the ODP. As described in the box on How Google’s PageRank ...